by Jerry
ONE NIGHT we were in our room, dead for sleep after a long game, and Danny said, “Let me show you something.”
He shuffled the cards, I cut, and he dealt me an ace, king, queen, jack, ten and deuce of spades. He shuffled again and dealt me the same in hearts.
“Watch as closely as you can,” he grinned. “See if you can catch me.”
I couldn’t.
“I’ve been practicing,” he said. “I’m going to get Mattup.”
“What good will it do to beat him in cards? You’ll only make him sore.” I was relieved to learn what Danny had been doing, alone in our room, but this card-sharp angle didn’t make much sense to me.
“Who says I’m going to beat him at cards?” smiled Danny. “By the way, did you hear the rumor? They’re going to break up the staff, Outsider policy, send us to Oak Ridge, Argonne, Shippingport, send new people down here.”
“That doesn’t leave you much time,” I said.
“Time enough,” said Danny.
The next night Mattup began a fantastic streak of luck. It seemed he couldn’t lose, and he was as unpleasant a winner as he was a loser.
“You boys don’t know what card-playin’ is,” he’d gloat. “Think you’re pretty smarty with all that science stuff but you can’t win a plain old card game. You know why you can’t beat me, boys?”
“Because you’re too smart, I guess,” said Danny.
“Well, yeah, and somethin’ else. I dipped my hands in spunk water, up on the mountain where you can never find it, and besides that I spit on ever’ card in this deck and wiped it off. Couldn’t lose now to save my life.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Danny, and went on dealing.
In a few days the rumor of moving was confirmed; I was being sent to Oak Ridge, Danny to Argonne. Mattup kept winning, and “suggested” that we raise the stakes. By the day that we were to leave we owed him every cent we had.
I paid up soberly; I wouldn’t give Mattup any satisfaction by complaining. It looked as though Danny wasn’t going to “get” Mattup after all. But Danny surprised me.
“Look, buster,” he wheedled. “If I pay you seventy-five bucks I won’t have a cent left. How about me paying half now and the rest later?”
“No good,” said Mattup. “You got it—pay me. If you can’t pay cash gimme your watch. I know you got one.”
“Look, buster—”
“Quit callin’ me buster.”
“What am I going to live on until I get paid again?”
“What do I care?”
It went on like that until the busses for the airport were nearly ready to leave and both men seemed angry enough to kill each other.
“Let’s go,” I begged Danny. “Pay him and leave.”
“All right then!” Danny snapped, and pulled out his wallet. He counted out all his bills into Mattup’s hand.
“You’re a buck short,” said Mattup.
“Why not forget the buck?” said Danny. “You can spare it.”
“You’re a buck short,” repeated Mattup, scowling.
Danny dashed his wallet to the ground. “You’re even taking my change!” He got his jacket from the back of a chair—it was a hot day—and emptied change from the side pocket.
There were two quarters and a half dollar, and he paid them over. “I have eleven cents left,” he said. “Hell, take that too. I don’t give a damn.”
Mattup grinned. “Sure I’ll take it—if you weren’t lying when you said I could have it.”
“It’ll break me,” said Danny.
“I know it,” said Mattup. “Gonna break your promise?”
The bus driver was honking. “The hell with you,” Danny said to Mattup, and gave him a dime and a penny. He looked Mattup in the eye with a strange expression. “Now, I gave you that and you didn’t win it. You took it of your own free will. I offered it to you and you took it. Right?”
“Right,” said Mattup. “Sucker.”
We scrambled on the bus and as it pulled away Danny yelled “Hey, Buster, look!” Mattup looked, and Danny stuck his right arm out the window, pointing at Mattup with his right forefinger and his little finger stuck out straight and parallel, the thumb tucked under. A strange, disturbed look came over Orley. He turned his back as the bus roared out of the drive.
At the airport Danny popped into a phone-booth and got Orley on the line—nobody seemed to care, either Outsiders or guards—and he let me listen.
“Spent your money yet, dead man?” purred Danny.
“Whacha mean, dead man?” gruffed Orley’s voice. “You crazy or something?”
“You know that eleven cents extra you took?” gloated Danny. “It’s gonna kill you, Buster, for killing Uncle Pete, and for everything else you’ve done. I know. I’ve been talking nights to Uncle Pete. You’re a dead duck, Orley Mattup! Dead!”
“That’s—I don’t believe it, it’s baloney! I’m going to spend that eleven cents and get rid of it.”
“You do exactly that, Buster. I locked the curse on it, and I made the sign on you, and you have to keep that eleven cents the rest of your life. If you spend it—or if you lose it, and you will lose it—that’s the end of you.”
“I’ll come out there and pound the hell out of you!” yelled Mattup.
“Too late, Buster, our planes are leaving. Goodbye, dead man!”
And we had to run for our planes. Danny’s pitch sounded pretty weak to me, even though Orley was superstitious, but I didn’t get to tell Danny that until nearly five years later.
“I think I got him,” said Danny. “You don’t know the whole thing.”
A hotel clerk had been listening. “You mean Orley Mattup, the guard? He got sick, and said he had a hex on him, and took off one day and a lot later they found him up on the mountain. He was dead.”
“Any money on him?” asked Danny.
“Jest some change. They buried it with him; they heard the hex was locked onto that money.”
“Congratulations,” I told Danny. “I didn’t think it’d work. You scared him to death.”
“Not quite,” said Danny. “I scared him into hanging onto the money. That money would have killed anybody that carried it much longer than the few minutes I handled it. I’d been keeping the stuff in the reactor beam tubes. It was radioactive as hell.”
THE INVISIBLE MAN MURDER CASE
Henry Slesar
When you come right down to it, Tm a pretty nice guy. I’m not so homely that you couldn’t face me across a luncheon table, and not so handsome that you wouldn’t mind bringing your girl along. I make pleasant small talk, and know how to listen sympathetically. I’m relatively modest about my accomplishments, even if I am a sort of celebrity (my last book sold one million four hundred thousand copies in the paperback edition). So, being fully aware of the general niceness of me, Jeff Oswald, it came as a rude shock to realize that there was somebody in this world who hated my guts. Someone who despised me.
I got my first hint of this alarming fact when the Mystery Authors Association extended me an invitation to take their podium for half an hour. It was a big moment for me, being asked to speak before such an auspicious gathering. I had just published my first novel (Kill Me Quietly, Wharton Publishers, S2.95) and the ink hadn’t dried on my second contract. As you might know, the book became something of an instantaneous best-seller, and there was a public clamor for further adventures of my private-eye hero, Rufe Armlock. Always alert to public demand, I’ve since responded with nine more novels, each slightly gorier (and more successful) than the last.
Anyway, the MAA slipped me a nice note, asking me to lecture, and I willingly obliged. I don’t believe my speech made any great impression, but I think the membership was amused to get a look at me. After reading about Rufe Armlock, they must have expected something different. (His face was like a granite slab, chiseled on by a bad sculptor. His shoulders were too wide for most doorways. When he smiled, he could chill a hood’s blood or boil a woman’s.) Actuall
y, my face is more the kind you see in graduation-class photos, the big-eared kid in the back row with the pink cheeks and silly grin. I guess I didn’t look like the author of Kill Me Quietly at all.
It was after the lecture that I met the man who hated me. I didn’t realize the enmity at first; I was too flattered just to be introduced to Kirk Evander. Evander had been a kind of hero of my childhood, when I discovered his intricate detective novels after exhausting the output of Conan Doyle, S.S. Van Dine, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and the rest. Once I had thought that an Evander novel was the epitome of the classic mystery yam, but his most recent efforts hadn’t held the old magic. He was past sixty now; he was beginning to plagiarize himself.
“Gee, Mr. Evander,” I said, in a voice that sounded boyish to my own ears, “this is a great pleasure for me.”
He was a small, wispy man with mournful features, but there was a lot of incandescence in his eyes and he shook hands as if we were trading fish.
“Thank you,” he said dryly. “This book of yours, Mr. Oswald. Did you say it was called Kill Me Quickly?”
“Quietly,” I corrected. “I’m afraid it’s one of these hard-boiled novels, Mr. Evander. Nothing like the things you write.”
“I imagine not.” He pursed his lips. “And do you seriously classify this work as a mystery?”
“I don’t classify it at all. You see, I have this private-detective character called Rufe Armlock. He’s a sort of tough—”
“Spare me,” Evander said, shutting his eyes. “I’ve heard quite enough about private detectives, Mr. Oswald. The occupation has been an excuse for the worst offenses against good taste that I have ever known. You will pardon me if I am not amused.”
I admit I was disappointed. Not because Evander didn’t like my book; I expected that. But my picture of the author was shattered by meeting him. He looked like a dissipated college professor, and talked like a refugee from a bad English play. I shifted uncomfortably, and began to eye the crowd in search of interesting females.
But Evander wasn’t through with me yet.
“Do you know something, Mr. Oswald? Young men like yourself, with their Freudian nightmares translated into violent images of ‘private eyes’ and ‘naked blondes’ and assorted cruelties, are primarily responsible for the decline of the detective story.”
“Gee, I’m sorry, Mr. Evander—”
“Sorry? If you were truly sorry, Mr. Oswald, you would do the world a favor. You would chop off your hands before they ever touched a typewriter again. Or, if that cure seems too drastic, you would bum every manuscript you write before the world ever sees it.”
I still didn’t get upset. I told you I was nice.
“Well, Mr. Evander, I don’t think I could do that. You see, I write for money.”
“Why?”
“To eat, I guess.”
“Why?”
I began to get the idea that Mr. Evander wasn’t partial to me. I took the hint and wandered off in search of the before-mentioned females. Luckily, I found one. Her name was Eileen, and she turned out to be an admirer of mine. It was nice to talk to her, especially since she was a lot prettier than Kirk Evander. After the meeting, we went to her apartment in Greenwich Village. Eileen was an Associate Member of the Mystery Authors, which meant she hadn’t sold anything yet. She read me the first chapter of a suspense novel called Black Night at Bennington. It was terrible. Unfortunately, I said so, and the evening ended badly.
It was almost six months before I saw Kirk Evander again, and by that time, my second novel (A Fistful of Blood) had become the bestselling paperback on the stands. I went to another MAA meeting, with the vague hope of running into Eileen again. I had already forgotten Evander’s acid comments, and even if I hadn’t, I was too swelled with my own success to let them worry me. When I saw the little guy, looking as if he had worn the same rumpled suit from the last meeting to this, I greeted him cheerfully.
“How’s everything?” I asked. “Got a new book on the fire, Mr. Evander?”
The man standing next to the writer, a snooty-looking guy that worked for Wharton Publishing, the outfit that produced my books and Evander’s, coughed and moved away. Evander turned on me and smiled without humor.
“My new book,” he said bitingly, “is, indeed, on the fire. As I’m sure you’ve heard.”
I batted my eyes. “Huh?”
“It seems the public doesn’t want crime literature any more. It wants filth. It wants garbage! Unfortunately, there are people like you, Mr. Oswald, to provide it in ready supply.”
He whirled on his heel and stalked away. Just then, Eileen appeared out of the crowd and pulled me to one side.
“For heavens’ sake!” she said, tapping her foot. “Are you still shooting off your mouth, Jeff Oswald?”
“Gosh, it’s nice to see you again, Eileen.” It was nice. She was a remarkably pretty girl, with Oriental eyes and auburn hair.
“I guess you’ll never learn,” she sighed. “Why must you be so tactless?”
I shifted my feet guiltily. “I’m sorry about that. I wouldn’t have told you that about your novel, but you begged me for an honest opinion—”
“I don’t mean that. I mean Kirk Evander. Didn’t you know about his last book?”
“No.”
“Well, it was the flop of the year. He considered it his masterpiece, but the reviewers called it a pompous bore. One of these real period pieces. A locked-room murder in the family mansion, with millions of obscure clues.”
“Gee, that’s too bad. I used to admire that guy.”
“He’s nothing but an old fool. And maybe something else . . .” She looked into the crowd thoughtfully. Then she bit her lip, and added: “And how he hates you.”
“Hates me?”
“I’ve heard him carry on about you in other meetings. He thinks you’re the sole reason for his failure. He practically has a stroke when your name is mentioned.”
“Gosh! I hardly even know the guy.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re some kind of symbol to him. All the hate that’s been building up in him for the last few years—he’s directing it at you.”
I frowned. I didn’t like being hated.
“Ah, the heck with it,” I said, trying to be bright. “You and me need a drink.”
“You and I,” she said primly. “Some writer you are.”
So we had a drink. As a matter of fact, we had several. That was my mistake.
Around eleven o’clock, I was carrying seven or eight martinis in my pouch, and my head felt like a sputnik, revolving slowly around the meeting room. I wasn’t used to so much alcohol, even if my hero, Rufe Armlock, was. (He cracked the cap on a bottle of bourbon and tilted the neck into his mouth. He didn’t lower it until the brown stuff was below the plimsoll line, but when he put it down, his steely eyes hadn’t changed in focus or alertness.) As a matter of fact, I was pie-eyed, and saying a lot of stupid things. Like telling Kirk Evander just what I thought of him and his “classic” detective novels.
“You’re a bore,” I said, poking a finger into his chest. “Thash what you are. A bore. And you know what your novels are? Impopable. I mean improbable. All those locked-room murders and junk like that. That kind of thing never happens. Never!”
Evander remained calm while I lectured him. But out of my drunken fog, his eyes shone like yellow lanterns.
“Never happens,” I said again. “People don’t get bumped off that way. Unnerstand, Mister Evander?”
“Of course,” he said bowing slightly. “Thank you for the opinion, Mr. Oswald.”
“S’all right,” I grinned. “Nice to help. You jus’ listen to ol’ Rufe Armlock. I mean Jeff Oswald. The public does not believe that stuff any more. They want action. Not that ol’ locked-room junk. Unnerstand?”
“Perfectly,” Kirk Evander told me.
By this time, Eileen had the good sense to pull me away. She coaxed me out of the meeting hall and took me to her apartment, where I
made one slobbering attempt to kiss her. It failed miserably, and she thrust me out the door like a cat. Somehow, I got myself home.
In the morning, an air-raid siren woke me up. After a while, I realized it was only the doorbell. I got up and let my visitor in. It was Aaron Snow, my agent.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“What time’s it?” I groaned.
“Three.” Aaron frowned at me, in his fatherly way. He was a year older and fifty years wiser, and he looked like an aging quiz kid. “I’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone’s off the hook. I wanted to report on that Wharton meeting this morning.”
“What meeting?”
“I guess you didn’t know. Kirk Evander stormed in there this mom-mg, and gave ’em an ultimatum. Either they strike you from their list, or him.”
“What?”
“That’s the truth. He must have been crazy to do it; his last book sold about eight hundred copies, and I suspect he bought ’em all himself. He should have known they wouldn’t drop a hot-rock like you.”
“So what happened?”
“They tried to placate him, of course. He was once important to their Mystery Division. And who knows? He might come through with a big book yet. But Evander stood his ground. Either you go—or he does.”
“What did Wharton say?”
“What could they say? They simply refused to accept. He stormed out again, promising never to darken their door.” Aaron sighed. “Feel sorry for the old guy. He was really a great writer. He’ll never get lined up with a first-grade publisher now.”
“Gee, that’s rough.”
“Don’t let it worry you. Just concentrate on that next opus of yours. Got a title yet?”
“Yeah, tentatively. To Kiss A Corpse. Like it?”
Aaron grimaced. “No. That must mean it’s good.”